The U.S.
Supreme Court will soon decide D.C. v. Heller, the first case in more
than 60 years in which the court will confront the meaning of the
Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Although Heller is about the
constitutionality of the D.C. handgun ban, the court's decision will
have an impact far beyond the District ("Promises breached," Op-Ed,
Thursday).

The court must decide in Heller whether the Second
Amendment secures a right for individuals to keep and bear arms or
merely grants states the power to arm their militias, the National
Guard. This latter view is called the "collective rights" theory.

A
collective rights decision by the court would violate the contract by
which Montana entered into statehood, called the Compact With the
United States and archived at Article I of the Montana Constitution.
When Montana and the United States entered into this bilateral contract
in 1889, the U.S. approved the right to bear arms in the Montana
Constitution, guaranteeing the right of "any person" to bear arms,
clearly an individual right.

There was no assertion in 1889
that the Second Amendment was susceptible to a collective rights
interpretation, and the parties to the contract understood the Second
Amendment to be consistent with the declared Montana constitutional
right of "any person" to bear arms.

As a bedrock principle of
law, a contract must be honored so as to give effect to the intent of
the contracting parties. A collective rights decision by the court in
Heller would invoke an era of unilaterally revisable contracts by
violating the statehood contract between the United States and Montana,
and many other states

Numerous Montana lawmakers have
concurred in a resolution raising this contract-violation issue. It's
posted at progunleaders.org. The United States would do well to keep
its contractual promise to the states that the Second Amendment secures
an individual right now as it did upon execution of the statehood
contract.